The verdict for a court-martial judge: the fate of ustasha official Oktavijan Svježić

Abstract

The fate of Oktavijan Svježić had not been hitherto recorded in detail. Even though it concerns a relatively high-ranked official of the judicial and secret security system of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC), the information known to the public regarding his professional activities remains scant and incomplete, whereas that concerning his private life, including the information on his birth and death, is imprecise. The latter particularly includes the facts regarding his origin. Because of this, inter alia, he deserves an extensive discussion. More precisely, in several works where he is mentioned, he is named as »Muci Frischman«, which was used to emphasise his Jewishness and via that the implication of direct proselytism in joining the Ustasha movement.

However, more meticulous research based on the original archival sources has shown that his life story is not as nearly as simple. The fact is that Oktavijan Svježić never had the Frichtmann surname, even though his relatives and friends indeed called him »Muci«. He was born a Croat and baptised as a Catholic, the faith to which both of his parents belonged at the time of his birth. His Jewish genes were the heirloom of his father Stjepan Žiga or, to be more precise, his grandfather Marko Frischmann, who at the end of the 19th century most probably moved from Banja Luka to Croatia with his family. Oktavijan’s father converted to Catholicism alongside his brothers and sisters in 1907, thus changing his surname to Svježić, i.e. the Croatian version of its German original. All this, however, is not enough to label Oktavijan a Jewish convert.

It his most likely that Oktavijan’s Jewish origin had in fact played a certain role in his (in)formal joining of the Ustasha movement before World War II. In any case, he himself testified to the post-war Communist investigators that he had joined the state apparatus to protect his family, which was stigmatised by its Jewishness. There could be a grain of truth in that statement, but the real reasons were muchdeeper. Even before the new state was established on the ruins of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Svježić became a dependable member of pro-Ustasha organisations, maintaining close contacts with Slavko Kvaternik, a distinguished member of the movement and later on »a marshal«. All this encouraged the young and perspective doctor of law to become state-employed immediately after the new regime had been established.

After briefly serving as a secretary to the first ISC commissioner for Bosnia and Herzegovina, he became a member of the mobile court-martial in Sarajevo in the summer of 1941. In early 1942, he began working in the Ustasha Surveillance Service (UNS), which is also when his friendship with Eugen »Dido« Kvaternik began. While in the UNS he became prominent for mediating in arms and munitions procurement for the Home Guard and Ustasha troops during their breakthrough to Drina River under the command of Jure Francetić in late 1941 and early 1942, and later on in the infamous »Action« led by Viktor Tomić in Syrmia in the summer of 1942, where he served as his deputy. At his own request, he withdrew from the secret service, then partially performed his military service, and worked for his father’s private company. In August 1944, he once again entered the civil service, acting as a judge or a presiding member of military courts-martial in Sarajevo, attending to these duties until the end of the ISC.

Joining the Home Guard and the Ustasha troops in their withdrawal from Sarajevo and shortly afterwards from Zagreb, he was disarmed at the Yugoslavian–Austrian border and afterwards he furtively decided to return to his native town, where he had left his wife and parents. Before his arrest in 1947, he had been hiding for two years from the Communist authorities, who had in the meantime sentenced him in absentia to twenty years of hard labour for committed war crimes. He spent the next four years in prisons writing various reports on participating in war events and on persons he had collaborated with. In the end, he was sentenced to death in a procedure at Zagreb’s County Court in 1950. It was carried out by firing squad at Zagreb’s Mirogoj Cemetery in March 1951, after numerous unsuccessful appeals to the Supreme Court of the People’s Republic of Croatia and the Presidency of the National Assembly of Yugoslavia. His family members, including his wife and daughter, learned of his fate thirteen years later, i.e. seventeen years after his arrest.